Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this a great time to be alive? It would be very difficult to be bored right now wouldn't it? At this precise moment of historical time, I mean.
What with a bang up shootin' war courtesy of Bill Clinton and NATO, 50 Aussie wallopers soon set to keep the peace in East Timor, a GST to get to know and the flowerin' of democracy among our neighbours to the near north ... you'd have to be a hard-nosed bastard not to be affected by it all.
Not that there's anything wrong with it. With indifference I mean. Caught up in the everyday, it isn't easy to pause awhile and take in the big picture. What with the kids, the mortgage and problems at work. No, it isn't easy, is it?
Even keeping up with the news can be a pain. Some days you don't get a chance to scratch yourself. As for the business of thinking through an issue ... tell me about it! I'm lucky to know which shoe goes on which foot.
What we really need is our own adviser — someone who will customise the everyday parry and thrust in this big, wide world for our own personal use without bothering us with too much detail or too many issues. What we need is a specialist who can arrange the world for us like a menu of subjects all set out in order of priority, served up neatly, arranged and displayed, so that we can make informed culinary choices, confident that it has already been ethically vetted.
Fortunately, help is at hand. Yes, indeed. This crying need for all us poor touchy-feely souls has finally been addressed by the Australian Democrats.
I kid you not. The Dems. Bet you were thinkin' that the Dems were sort of like an old shoe — hanging around somewhere in the musty spaces of the wardrobe of life. Think again! The Dems are a player and a key player at that. What we have here is the party we have when we don't have a party.
You can get anything you want at the Democrats' restaurant. You want concern? You've got it! You want savvy? Say no more. You want talking heads, Stott Despoja and ethics? You want those things? You want liberated women — sisters doing it for all of us — then the Dems are for you.
Just when you were about to give the whole political game away as a bad job, suddenly this Clayton's party has monopolised the market for relevance.
Sure, the Dems have been around for yonks. Maybe you were wonderin' when they'd do something exciting, if only to keep you interested. Well, the Dems have come up with the goods (and services) and given us a GST. Yesiree, we've got our very own indigenous GST tailored to our everyday personal use.
Isn't that what we wanted? You wanted a GST didn't you? Of course you did. Didn't you?
All we can say is: dem damn Dems!
By Dave Riley